When I play I work smarter

Editorial

SEEDS magazine whose central focus is to feature experiential and branded experience exhibition design projects,” is a multi-platform publication that highlights the work produced by the Graduate Exhibition Design students of the Fashion Institute of Technology. The first issue theme focuses on “Food Opera,” is a site-specific project located in Madison Square Park. This issue contains a statement from the Chair Brenda Cowan on the Future of Museums, in which she explains, “Ten years from now exhibitions will, if we’re smart, seamless incorporate state of the art technology, that communicate, inspire, excite, inform and evoke users experience better than in the past.”

Initially, SEEDS featured only our student’s first major project—since then we have opted to broaden our scope to include final capstone thesis project this provides richer content that’s timely. Since the graduate program has undergone extensive curriculum changes, we needed the magazine to be far-reaching to engage a broader audience of alumnae, industry leaders and functions as a mechanism to market the program.

The magazine is meant to function across multiple platforms offers easy access to readers. Some of these platforms include: ISSUU an online publishing platform; PDF’s for easy uploading from the department’s website. After reviewing recent student’s projects, we also noticed more and more students are producing projects that embraced interactivity, web-based or mobile technology. This meant the creators of SEEDS had to focus more on the delivering content across multiple platforms, by creating layouts that exploit the immersive experiences integrating slide shows, and buttons, videos all make for a more dynamic reading. We opted to shift our direction to produce future issues for viewing on the iPad tablet. Our intention needs to suit the students demand to deliver an immersive experience that included video interviews, short animations, and sound effects produced by our students.

At the same time, we wanted to address each issue’s theme. Taking into consideration; use of thematic icons, decision for fonts, margins, navigation, and interaction, all affect the users sense of pleasure, and control over the content. Finally for each issue, we crafted a different logo inspired by the overall theme, and new content of work produced by our students.